Mozilla Gets (Beta) Native SVG support

Rushuru writes "Mozilla is getting a beta native SVG support. Previously one had to use 3rd party plugins such as that from Adobe, and they only worked on windows. SVG is similar in scope to Flash, but it is a W3 recommendation (i.e. a standard) and uses an open format. The project page has more info."

Comments

Does anybody actually do anything in SVG?

[Anonymous Coward]

Website examples?

Re:Does anybody actually do anything in SVG?

[pen]

mozilla svg samples

Re:Does anybody actually do anything in SVG?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check the SodiPodi galleries. They got all sorts of stuff including flags, corporate logos, animals, tux, and cartoons.

Re:Does anybody actually do anything in SVG?

[mrjb]

It being an open format might help gaining acceptance, as happened with .png (although some popular commercial browsers have flakey support).

It's going to be a long, long struggle against the de facto industry standard, even though projects like sodipodi might help it.

Not everyone understands why following standards is important. The countless broken pages I've seen because somebody decided that using JavaScript was much cooler than using HTML that actually worked... Also, I've seen many companies giving up on flash sites in favor of a simple (but OK looking) HTML-based site that works. I guess the success of the standard depends less on the technology than to the way it is applied.

There is a Geek God

[ovoskeuiks]

It was only a few hours ago I was reading a post in another slashdot article that was asking for SVG support in browsers looks like his prayers were answered

Re:Bandwith eating useless animations

[m00nun1t]

SVG is a great format for reporting. A much cleaner & potentially more interactive way of displaying complex data than just "static, text and jpgs". Check out the adobe SVG site (http://www.adobe.com/svg), they have some great examples.

And yes, people will use it as a flash wannabe. But that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned - moving from a semi-proprietary format (I know the flash format is *kinda* open) to a standards based format - and XML based, no less.

Re:Bandwith eating useless animations

[jpnews]

"What's wrong with static, text and jpgs only pages?"

Yeah, I agree totally. That's why I read the newspaper.

At last!

[darnok]

*Finally*, I can start saying SVG is going to be supported natively in a browser, and pushing through projects on that basis.

Until now, I've had to say you can use IE, then get an addon from Adobe. "What? Why doesn't MS support this SVG thing natively? What if Adobe decides to drop support for SVG; then what happens? ..."

This is the best news I've read on Slashdot for a while

Re:At last!

[snillfisk]

Until now, I've had to say you can use IE, then get an addon from Adobe. "What? Why doesn't MS support this SVG thing natively? What if Adobe decides to drop support for SVG; then what happens? ..."

Sorrowly, this has already happened; Adobe hasn't updated their plugin since 2001 and is lacking support for everything newer than the 1.0 standard. The most promising plugin at the moment is with no doubt the Corel SVG Viewer which looks and handles really neat. We've tried the mozilla native support in earlier editions (mainly about ~3 months ago) and the implementation was currently very lacking of needed features.

One point I would like to make; the first plugin (or browser) to support the upcoming SVG 1.2 standard is going to get a quite instant userbase, the interest for SVG is only growing -- something which SVG Open just showed (I was a coauthor for one of the papers, Distributed GML Management with SVG Tools).

Re:At last!

[smallpaul]

Sorrowly, this has already happened; Adobe hasn't updated their plugin since 2001 and is lacking support for everything newer than the 1.0 standard.

This is not true. Adobe has an alpha with support for SVG 1.2.

Re:SVG/Flash

[andrewl6097]

Err...no. From the article:

SVG is similar in scope to Macromedia's proprietary Flash technology: among other things it offers anti-aliased rendering, pattern and gradient fills, sophisticated filter-effects, clipping to arbitrary paths, text and animations.

Re:Bandwith eating useless animations

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing inherently wrong with the technology just because some people will use it for stupid things.

Your post was stupid, but I don't think we should abolish the alphabet because of it.

Some things are better represented in vector graphics and this can be a great tool for that type of thing. Why waste bandwidth transmitting the same map over and over (for different zooms) when you could just get one that is zoomable on the client end? Need a printable diagram ... get one that looks good on screen and also prints well, instead of the horrible blocky printed crap you get with GIF/JPG.

mozilla-bonobo

[Pflipp]

You could already have seen some of SVG through the mozilla-bonobo plugin. As this plugin actually activates Eye Of Gnome for the image viewing, and EOG is actually more of a pixel-graphics viewer that happens to read SVG through the (still lagging) librsvg, the capacities are limited though.

For instance, you can only view SVG images as object tags, and complex stuff (like copied/ rotated graphics) aren't rendered well. (And it just so happens that Sodipodi produces SVG with a lot of copied/ rotated objects.)

Re:Bandwith eating useless animations

[big.ears]

I know this is a troll, but I'll bite.

SVG is often takes much less room than the equivalent jpg/png/gif. It has great potential to eliminate the need for a lot of crappy graphics hacks used out there. For example, once easy-to-script graphing libraries are available, you will be able to make svg graphs of real-time data (of web activity, stock prices, etc.) instead of using bitmaps. For much data, this will be much smaller and more aesthetically pleasing. Some large interesting background images etc. will be possible because they are not constrained by the actual size of the image, just the detail. Although svg is being compared to Flash, it is really more proper to think of it as an embeddable .eps or something; I'm not even sure if it handles animation and I don't think it can embed sound events.

Plotting against Microsoft

[NoTildeQuestionMark]

If this SVG patch became fully useable for displaying animation, and then you could convince a really popular animation site (say, HSR) to switch to SVG and recommend a switch to Mozilla for native support... well, then, open source could rule the world.

~

Re:Firebird

[Anonymous Coward]

and why? because there is no cross platform working websolution for it.
So if it's by default in mozille (firebird), it might finally push SVG ... and make it what it is supposed to be, a webstandard.

And finally you don't have to use our redmonds frieds beloved software, to create dynamic( read: flash ( like )) pages.

damn if this ain't going to be standart (maybe you can get a option in Firebird or a compiler option like '--disable-svg' ) but might be you want '--disable-art-*' too... what ever :)

i'd be very sad if this would not become a part of mozilla.( firebird ) by default.

include it in the standard build - when it's done

[wfmcwalter]

SVG is a brilliant standard, and will go a long way to replace the web's millions of opaque flash and shockwave animations (and any number of "diagram" gifs) with something standard and accessible. I'm exceptionally frustrated that I can't realistically author mission-critical sites with SVG as a major (or even the entire) component.

I do, however, pray thay SVG isn't included into standard mozilla (or any other browser) until it's reached maturity (which its page indicates it's pretty far from). I spend too much of my time working around the half-assed CSS implementations of older netscape and IE browsers, and I don't want another decade of worrying about which part of the SVG standard was implemented buggily (sp?) by which version of which browser.

I'm all for beta releases, developer's builds, etc., as the team needs as much feedback from as full an SVG authoring community as it can. But as soon as someone starts authoring sites that depend on the weird vagaries of one browser or another's SVG misimplementation, we'll be going down a painfull bug-for-bug compatibility road. Caveat.

Re:Yet another mozilla advantage over IE

[DarkDust]

and yet people still use IE. As a web designer, I have to ask, "WHY!?"

Simple: because people are fucking lazy ! They get their IE with their Windows, and they are just too lazy to download and install Mozilla or Opera (and they don't care about them since every web designer/developer out there supports IE with their web pages).

If someone visits my homepage with IE the background is replaced with simply white since IE can't handle transparent PNGs and a red warning box is diplayed explaining that IE is just not able to correctly display my homepage (while Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror do).

If more web-pages would do this people would finally think, but this will take some months. MicroSoft gladly doesn't want to update IE any more, so people have to wait for the next Windows to get an update to IE, which is due in 2005 I think. Lots of time which could make a difference if the other browser developers and web designers/developers use that time. And features like good SVG support could really be that difference (and tabs, and blocking of JavaScript pop-ups, and ...).

IE is out of date just now, but people don't care about this, that's the propblem...

Re:Yet another mozilla advantage over IE

[JimDabell]

Because:

• "What's Mozilla?"
• "What's SVG?"
• "But there aren't any pages using SVG that I want to see."
• "Flash is good enough for me."
• "I don't know how to / want to figure out how to install Mozilla."
• "All my favourites/passwords/auto form-fillins are in Internet Explorer."
• "Mozilla looks weird compared with all the other programs on my computer."
• "My employers have already standardized on Internet Explorer."
• "I have to use Internet Explorer to run some .hta programs that I rely on." (or substitute any proprietary technology supported by Internet Explorer).
• "My bank's website doesn't say that I can use Mozilla with it, but they do say I can use Internet Explorer with it."
• "Internet Explorer is already installed on my computer."

I'm a web developer too, and I hate having to deal with Internet Explorer too, but end-user inertia isn't something to dismiss as "people being stupid". You have to give them a reason to care enough to put effort into switching browsers.

SVG test images and SVG apps

[greenrd]

After you've downloaded you can test your new SVG-enabled mozilla build by checking out these galleries (see links on left of page). The thumbnails are ordinary bitmap images but they are linked to SVGs.

Bonus: All the images in the above galleries are Open Source, unless otherwise stated! (Quite literally, because SVG files are like "source code" for a vector image.)

As for SVG creating and editing software, apart from the new dSVG software announced earlier today on Slashdot, we have:

• Apache Batik for all you Java people. This is a fairly mature library (I believe it's based off the CSIRO library), plus sample apps like a viewer, a rasteriser (i.e. convert to gif, jpeg, etc.), a font converter, and a pretty-printer. Quotage: "With Batik, you can manipulate SVG documents anywhere Java is available. You can also use the various Batik modules to generate, manipulate, transcode and search SVG images in your applications or applets." Batik, according to its test suite, supports all of the static SVG specification (i.e. static images) and some of the dynamic specification (i.e. animations and scripting).

  (Get your easy installable RPMs for Batik, and many other Java projects, at jpackage - but good luck finding a download link that works! Batik 1.5 hadn't propagated to all the Sourceforge mirrors when I tried it last night - so try all the US mirrors, it will be on at least one of them. Also, because of the numerous dependencies, it's recommended to use a smart package manager that can automatically resolve dependencies, like apt-get or urpmi.)

• Sodipodi, [screenshots] a GNOME SVG drawing app, currently at version 0.32. It hosts the open source SVG image gallery linked to above.

• For more, including KDE/Konq support for SVG, see this Wiki page

SVG for data visualization

[Henry Stern]

This might be a bit off topic, but I want to use SVG for data visualization and have been having trouble finding suitable software.

The SVG implementations I've found so far either have no external user interface with nice things like scrollbars (Adobe/Corel) or can't handle my very large graphics (everything else I've seen).

I've been very disappointed about this lack of good viewers. SVG is well-suited for data visualization and could become a "killer app" with the right software support.

Re:SVG for data visualization

[rockmuelle]

SVG has a long way to go before it will be suitable for data visualization. Most real world visualizations are based on large datasets and require a certain degree of interactivity. Both of these are possible using SVG. However, coding up an interactive application using JavaScript and the DOM model favored by the SVG designers is a non-trivial task.

A typical data set may contain 10,000 or more elements (e.g. financial analysis, temperature/forcast data, usage stats for a medium size web site, marketing data for a product line). Immediately, this requires a DOM tree with at least that many nodes. Given that each node requires a certain amout of meta-data and a containment heirarchy, the amount of data that needs to be transferred between the client/server, parsed, and managed in the browser grows quickly.

Ignoring the physical challeges of using DOM, there is also an abstraction challenge: Not all data fits nicely into the tree/scene-graph paradigm embraced by SVG. Of course, data can be transformed to use this model, but manipulating the data will be much more challenging.

Assuming a suitable DOM representation of the data exists, the next challenge is developing the JavaScript to allow the user to explore and manipulate the data. With no real package support and no built-in way to manage a large code base, JavaScript is not the ideal language for developing reusable vis code.

Before data visualization becomes commonplace in SVG browsers, another abstraction will need to be built on SVG that addresses the specific needs of the data vis community. This could be in the form of libraries that abstract the SVG frameworks with data vis APIs or another XML dialect that can be transformed into SVG.

I'm holding out hope that the SVG community will slow down on the feature creep and architecture bloat and focus on developing applications with the currect standard. Only by stepping back and trying to use the current system will the architects of SVG know what's missing and what needs improvement.

-Chris

Re:SVG for data visualization

[Hibernator]

A new SVG 1.2 draft specification was just published last Tuesday. It describes two things that may help provide the user interface elements you need.

First, the SVG Working Group is looking at supporting XForms in SVG.

Second, there is new feature for rendering custom content ("RCC") which would allow people to create sharable SVG components (kind of like Java Beans).

Re:Firebird

[MikeFM]

I believe the current Mozilla and the Firebird branch share a codebase. In either case you can always decide to compile this in if you so wish but at least for now it shouldn't be compiled in by default. As always you have the choice of what comes in Mozilla.. because you have the source.

SVG makes as much sense to have compiled in as support for jpeg, gif, or png graphics. It's just a vector based image format.

Re:SVG/Flash

[__past__]

You are wrong, scripting is just one possibility. You can also write animations purely declaratively using elements like <animate> or <animateMotion>, see the animation chapter in the SVG spec. Another possibility is SMIL.

Adobe SVG plug-in not windows-only

[Oniros]

Previously one had to use 3rd party plugins such as that from Adobe, and they only worked on windows.

The Adobe plug-in works fine on MacOS 9 and MacOS X.

There are even betas for Red Hat Linux and Solaris 8, though I have no idea how they fare.

Check:
http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/ main.html

Re:Adobe SVG plug-in not windows-only

[LordBodak]

It worked fine under Linux with Phoenix 0.5, but Firebird 0.6 broke it.

Question.

[Rhinobird]

Ok SVG is trying to be like Flash in scope, but i don't see anything besides animation. I see nothing about syncing with audio or adding interactive elements.

Are these possible and am i missing something from the svg documents? Or is it not there and there going to be a another super set of standards that uses SVG for the graphics and links with audio and has some scripting functions for interactivty?

Re:Question.

[JimDabell]

Ok SVG is trying to be like Flash in scope, but i don't see anything besides animation. I see nothing about syncing with audio or adding interactive elements.

I don't know why everybody has latched onto SVG == open Flash. SVG is just vector graphics. SMIL is closer to Flash in terms of functionality.

SVG never worked in windows

[savaget]

Previously one had to use 3rd party plugins such as that from Adobe, and they only worked on windows.

This is untrue as the plugin crashed in Windows. The release notes have noted this all along. Only a seperate build(branch) of Moz had native SVG support.

Re:Yet another mozilla advantage over IE

[MikeFM]

The real problem is that coders that develop for IE rarely check how pages work in anything else while decent developers check not only Mozilla but also IE and often Opera, Lynx, Konquerer, and whatever else they can get their hands on. Therefore IE users always have the best browsing experience.

I suggest anybody developing not-for-profit sites to simply save themselves the trouble and not make any special effort to support IE. Code to the standards. If IE can still show your page then great. If not then let the users know IE sucks - put a 'Works best with Mozilla.' button on your page to link to where users can download Mozilla. Circa 1997 gimmicks still work. ;)

Flash format is open

[weinford]

The SWF Format for flash movies is open, anyone can write programs with SWF output. Unfortunetaly I don't have a link at hand for documentation, but there are several programs with SWF output. I think that SWF has a major advantage over SVG, which is file size. The SVG XML format wastes plenty of bandwidth. Don't misunderstand me, XML and SVG are still very nice things, and I'm more than happy to see the news here, just wanted to point these things out.

Re:Flash format is open

[JimDabell]

I think that SWF has a major advantage over SVG, which is file size

A common technique in web development is to serve things in a compressed format. Virtually all browsers support this by transparently decompressing the files after they are recieved. This is part of HTTP (content-encoding).

Binary, already-compressed file formats don't benefit from this, but XML-based formats benefit a great deal. In practice, there won't be much difference in size between SVG and Flash, for the vast majority of people.

Re:Flash format is open

[snillfisk]

A common technique in web development is to serve things in a compressed format. Virtually all browsers support this by transparently decompressing the files after they are recieved. This is part of HTTP (content-encoding).

In addition, most plugins (at least which I have tried) also support SVGZ directly (standard gzip'ed SVG), both from the local disk and from the internet. Normally this compresses somewhere in the ratio of 80-90% (there is however still a few problems with large SVG-files in the plugins, so I would not recommend files with a native size over 1-2MB)..

SVG Examples

[wombatmobile]

Website examples?

SVGmaker gallery
Kevin Lindsey
Adobe examples
Andreas Neumann's Vienna GIS example

Native vs. non-native SVG

[KasparS]

(1) While I agree with some
posters that there is a danger of distributing unfinishend
implementations, having a NATIVE SVG is a real breakthrough though.
Quote: "Mozilla can handle documents that contain SVG, MathML, XHTML,
SMIL, etc. all mixed together in the same 'compound' document.... ".
Means for instance that you can simply add a little vector graphic INTO
your XHTML code instead of importing png. Also means that the same
DOM/Ecma interface can be used to program dynamic websites, or that you
can dynamically transform XML contents into XHTML/SVG with XSLT
client-side on the fly...

(2) On another note: Adobe's Plug-in version 6.0 BETA is available. And
it does not crash Mozilla 1.4 (Win2k) when embedded in HTML. In order
to install it with Mozilla (tested with Moz 1.4/Win2k) you must copy
the 2 files from:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\SVG Viewer 6.0\Plugins\*
to c:\Program Files\Mozilla.org\Mozilla\Plugins\ Did not see any Unix
version :(

http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/beta.html

PS: Plugin v3.0 kills Moz 1.4 (and others if you don't use iframes)

(3) There are some really cool SVG sites. My favorites:

http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/
(cool examples)

http://www.protocol7.com/svg-wiki/
(documentation about obscuret extensions,
i.e. shows how to get/post to URLS from within SVG ...)
- K

Re:Firebird

[jacksonyee]

SVG is really much, much more than a vector based image format though; it's an entire animation/effects plugin which will work seamlessly with current standards such as XHTML, MathML, CSS, and JavaScript (ECMAScript if you wish to be technical).

Adobe has already placed some very nice demos of embedding SVG within standard web pages. Take a look at some of the things that can be done with it, and you'll quickly see how the SVG standard can

• Replace large graphics with smaller XML code and custom effects
• Replace most of what Flash is: a proprietary language for interactive vector animation. The newer versions of Flash have some very nice extras, but for the most part, SVG can really dig into Macromedia's space if it's adopted by people other than just geeks, and being backed by Adobe is a very good sign.
• Allow accessibility within stylized content. Very few Flash animations on the web nowadays have any type of accessible content.

As far as the extra size in download goes, most people have to download Acrobat Reader to read PDF files, which are very common on the web. If SVG ever achieves the same status, I will be very encouraged as a web designer.

Now, if they would only get X3D in order...

Re:Bandwith eating useless animations

[jd142]

I would assume that just like Mozilla let's you block graphics it will eventually let you turn off svg's. I also just found out about the flash blocker,
Flash Cick to View. It's part of the Firebird extensions but also works great on plain mozilla 1.4 if you get it from the author's page.

With no popups, no ads and no flash, the web is usable.

Re:Save the world

[cyb97]

Just download the worldpeace plugin from mozilla.org... it sorts out everything...

Open Standards: SVG vs Flash

[gaspyy]

I just want to point out that Flash is an open format - you can download the specs from Macromedia.

I think SVG is very promising, but Flash already is available for 95% of the computers. It's reasonably fast, extremely compact (both the plugin and the .swf files) and its scripting language is quite powerful.

What I don't understand is why so many /.-ers hate it so much. Just because it's not GNU/Flash?

learnsvg.com

[Pflipp]

While on the topic of "SVG/SMIL != Flash" (or is, whatever), see also here. Though it is a book promotion website, there are lots of comprehensive examples on SVG, scripting SVG through Javascript (similar to simple Flash buttons) and combining SVG with SMIL.

That is, the W3C website says the link is also about SMIL. I'm still looking for that link.

Nice! job

[286]

It seem like just yesterday, in all the dSVG posts, people were complaing about just how weak
SVG support was and its back-burner status in Mozilla .

Native support is great, everything else is just a hack.
I for one am so excited to see this news!

Luddite?

[n0nsensical]

So maybe I'm just a web Luddite who wants plain old text and images, but if the Mozilla developers manage to put default SVG support in Firebird while keeping it small and fast it'll be a good thing, even if it's still a while before we see widespread use of SVG. As long as there's a runtime option to turn it off. ;-)

Re:Yet another mozilla advantage over IE

[eyeye]

Here is my stoned idea.
say Opera includes SVG support and can slim back down a little in download size (I remember when it would fit on a floppy of course). I just downloaded the adobe SVG plugin which was somewhere over 2 megs.

Web designers like SVG and make sites with it. Now most people wont be able to see it without a plugin.

So the website says "you need to download software to view this content", the user click ok and it installs Opera with settings defaulted to being as similar as IE as possible.

The user might never even notice, but their browser will when they are ready have lots of extra features.

Disclaimers: I would have said firebird but its considerably bigger, I remain hopefull howevere.
I realise its a dodgy method of installing, almost like adware/spyware.

Can't stand the Mozilla plugin architecture...

[kcbrown]

Who decided it would be a good idea to have Mozilla be totally exposed to the whims of a plugin?

A plugin should be sent mouse and keyboard events and be given an API to use to draw things into a "window" defined by the browser, and perhaps an API to retrieve data via an URL, and that's it. Mozilla might get that part right. But the plugin should also run in its own address space, so that if it decides to crash or otherwise do something stupid it won't take the browser with it. Mozilla definitely does not get that right.

Mozilla needs to be stable even in the face of crappy plugins. Right now, it's not, and that's something that badly needs to change.

Re:include it in the standard build - when it's do

[IamTheRealMike]

SVG support in Mozilla has been around for years, literally. The reason it never got into Moz yet is for exactly that reason.

Last I heard, maybe they were going to support the static SVG mini-spec or something. I'd be surprised if they dropped the policy of not including half baked implementations now.

Re:Open Standards: SVG vs Flash

[IamTheRealMike]

There are no free software authoring environments. Flash is open as long as you have the Flash program, or maybe SWiSH, all of which are proprietary and mostly expensive.

Re:Open Standards: SVG vs Flash

[JimDabell]

People hate Flash for many reasons. The one that stands out for me is that it just doesn't work right. I'm used to tabbing through links on a page. I'm used to middle-clicking to open in a new window. I'm used to right-clicking and getting a useful set of options. I'm used to my browser remaining quiet, instead of blaring out music over the top of whatever I am already listening to.

There are a hundred different ways in which it doesn't work right. Flash just doesn't fit well with the web. It's a good format for presentation, or for HSR-style sites, but for everyday interaction with the web, it's terrible. However, many web developers haven't actually realised this, and litter the web with monstrosities that give Flash a bad name.

I think of Flash as being in the same boat as Java applets. In certain circumstances, they can be the best tool for the job. But using them as part of a website's infrastructure, as opposed to merely being something that is on a website, is virtually always a mistake.

Here Here!!!

[Arbogast_II]

Seems like if the Open Source community would be better off improving Ming .swf file generator. Flash is good, and I don't see the need for adding to the Tower of Babel when a good standard with hooks to Open Source exists.

Why not back Flash and put the effort in improving Open Source support of Flash???

Mozilla has had SVG for ages

[Daa]

As one of the mozilla SVG developers I find it a bit funny that a user creating a freshmeat site to stash their copy of a mozilla svg build is slashdot news. there are daily win32 builds ( from both the trunk and branch SVG trees) posted to ftp.mozilla.org and about monthly linux ( RH7.1) tar.gz. and have been since mozilla 1.0

There is still no agreement to make SVG part of the base GRE install, the current effort is to re-merge the SVG devel branch back to the trunk

dave

Re:include it in the standard build - when it's do

[wfmcwalter]

The reason it never got into Moz yet is for exactly that reason.

My understanding that there was also a licence incompatibility issue wrt libart. I'd guess that's not an issue for the GDI+ win32 build, but has the libart licence issue been resolved?

Last I heard, maybe they were going to support the static SVG mini-spec or something.

The maturity level of both mozilla svg and some of the others (I'm most familiar with batik) shows that everyone seems to have most of the static features down; it's the dynamic features that (unsurprisingly) have lots of work yet to do. The SVG spec describes a static subset, as you say - they call it "Conforming Static SVG Viewers". The strategy you describe is exactly the smart thing everyone should be doing - getting the static stuff perfect and out there. As a web developer I can cope with two levels of SVG support (static and dynamic) particularly as the feature string is exposed in the DOM.

I'd be surprised if they dropped the policy of not including half baked implementations now.

I wish IE had the same policy.

Re:Yet another mozilla advantage over IE

[jd142]

The real problem is that coders that develop for IE rarely check how pages work in anything else

Which I've always found to be a bizarre way of doing things. I've found that ever since Mozilla .9 or thereabouts, that by coding to Mozilla, you will get a page that will work in pretty much every major browser. Granted, I'm not doing anything that fancy, just dynamic pages built from php/mysql that use javascript to manipulate the dynamic elements based on user choices. Since the DOM (at least the elements I use) is the same for mozilla, ie, konqueror (which means it should work for Macs now) and Opera, I don't have to worry about building browser detection in the scripts.

Because Mozilla is stricter about coding, you'll get better written code. IE let's the developer be sloppy, which produces sloppy pages. Mozilla is more strict, which forces me to produce better code.

Re:Open Standards: SVG vs Flash

[Tet]

What I don't understand is why so many /.-ers hate it so much

There are numerous problems with Flash, and SVG has the potential to solve all of them. Many people hate Flash so much because of the countless sites that have been rendered unreadable and unusable by gratuitous use of Flash.

License Issues

[caillon]

There has been a native SVG implementation in the Mozilla tree available for ages. In the 0.9.7 or 0.9.8 time frames, IIRC. However, it will not be turned on by default in any build because it requires libart which is licensed as LGPL only.

Mozilla.org has already refuted allowing it be distributed by default in the bug which allowed libart to be checked in to the tree under the other-licenses/ directory of the cvs repository. The reasoning was that Mozilla sources are released under the MPL and the extra license could potentially cause extra headaches for distributors (as far as ensuring compliance with them, keeping track of them, etc.). Additionally, there are already enough licenses for distributors to deal with, and Mozilla.org should be looking to decrease that number, not increase it.

Re:Open Standards: SVG vs Flash

[sehryan]

So blame the developer, don't blame the tool.

SVG is much more than a competitor to Flash

[Paul Bain]

SVG is similar in scope to Flash, but it is a W3 recommendation (i.e. a standard) and uses an open format.

SVG is actually much broader in scope than Flash, PDF, or other proprietary formats, as aptly pointed out by Paul Presod at SVG Open 2003.

Furthermore, the XML project of the Apache Software Founcation is hard at work on Batik, a Java-based toolkit for applications or applets that want to use images in the SVG format.

Re:SVG/Flash

[Zontar The Mindless]

> That's like saying you can make animations with HTML just because you can access HTML tags through the DOM and script them.

Um, no it's not. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a markup language for producing vector graphics, which HTML most definitely isn't. Right there in the name, even.

No soup for you.

Re:Don't get your hopes up

[styxlord]

zlib is completely free (and hence is used in a LOT of comercial software)

Animations, line drawings and Mapquest

[jfengel]

It appears that many people want SVG as a kind of Flash replacement. I've been waiting for general SVG acceptance for some time, but not for animations. I want it for maps, charts, and logos.

For example, Mapquest puts out lovely maps in GIF format, but they'd be a lot more useful to me if they were in SVG so that my 600 DPI printer could clearly render all the street names, rather than being locked into a format at 72 DPI. (They could use PDF for that, and I'm not entirely sure why they don't. Too expensive, either computationally or financially?)

Charts and logos would be a lot nicer given in SVG than GIF or JPEG. Again, that's most important when I intend to print it, but it's also useful for something where I'd like to zoom in to get the details.

A pet peeve: I see many corporate documents intended for printing where the logos obviously came from a web site, because they're blocky and ugly. It looks amateurish, but it can be very difficult to get a high-res version of an image. You can't incorporate a PDF into your word-processing documents, and EPS support is very spotty.

So I'm really looking forward to SVG. I just hope there's a button to turn off all the stupid animations. I use Firebird with an extension that requires a separate click to activate a Flash animation. That makes many web pages a far more pleasant experience. Yay SVG, boo Flash/Shockwave.

Re:Open Standards: SVG vs Flash

[smallpaul]

First, being able to download the specs does not make the format "open". An open format is defined in an open, relatively transparent process with input from multiple players including vendors and end-users. As long as Macromedia maintains sole control over the direction of the specification, it is not open. You can also download specs for the Word .DOC format. Second, you cannot download the specs without agreeing to a license agreement. The license agreement is specifically designed to allow you to create SWF files but not to create a viewer. Macromedia has not sued anyone who created a viewer but that's because nobody has done a good enough job to compete with them seriously. Imagine if an open source product competed so well that more people wanted the open source version than the Macromedia version. First, they could sue. Then, they could change the format to make the open source version obsolete. That's why Flash is not an open format. If Macromedia wants it to be open it should remove the licensing agreement and say that the specification is in the public domain for anybody to do anything with it.

Re:Yet another mozilla advantage over IE

[Joe Tie.]

While I do agree that being lazy does factor in for many cases, I think fear of change is a pretty heavy influence as well. The perfect example is a forum I used to post on. Someone there was having problems with a couple pages in IE, and many of us suggested she try using Mozilla. She did, and reported being astonished by how much quicker it loaded a few pages that she read on a regular basis, liked the pop-up blocking and tabs, and was impressed by how many more useful features it had compared to IE. You'd think with all that praise she'd be using Mozilla from that point on. Instead, she used it just for the page which was giving her problems in IE. Her reason for not switching browsers, Mozilla was just too different from IE and 'people don't like change'.

And I think that's something I at least lose sight of. Most people love familiartiy more than they love the idea of improving most situations. And that's furthered by many, or even most people on average, not enjoying learning new things. We're presented with new options, and find it fun to play with them and learn what they do. Many others might just look at the new option, click it once, see information they're not familiar with, and dump the program because the writers are making changes to what the users consider their program. The person in the above example also would refer to Internet Explorer as "my internet explorer", and I think that's a telling statement. A lot of people also seem to view their computers like their couch, or chair. It's something they own, and which should always remain in a static state.